It's also fascinating as an artifact documenting the current state of Zope. The message it sends is overwhelmingly positive.

While the usual polish problems in technical books are still evident (shame on us reviewers), it still is one of the better technology books I've encountered--looking through my library, say, top 10%. It's impressive that we attract authors and books of this caliber.

Springer is a very high-quality publisher.

I don't know of any other Zope books to get to a second edition--and the first edition is from 2005!

Phil Eby's foreward is high praise from a well-respected voice in the Python community.

The system the book describes is largely attractive and powerful from my perspective--it reminds me why I got excited about Zope in the first place.

Generally, it gives me a strong, welcome feeling of health for Zope.

There is a negative side to be found as well.

The book highlights some obvious holes for the beginner--for instance, when I was reviewing the text and trying to help polish some of the story, I was really struck by how painful the Zope 3 indexing story must be for a beginner, even while I love the flexibility.

The book doesn't touch on AJAX, because Zope 3 doesn't have an integrated story for it. It's easy enough to build AJAX apps--nothing is stopping you--but it's up to you. No nice AJAX widget story.

Philipp mentions a lack of relational database support beyond the basic transactional support of the database adapters; this both highlights a legitimate lack, and points to a continuing tension in the Zope community over the importance and use of the ZODB, the Zope Object Database.

Phil Eby's foreward alludes to the larger Python community's apathy or even antagonism to Zope; he also admits that he himself does not use it (presumably favoring his own PEAK).

Ah, well.

In any case, I highly recommend the book to anyone wanting to learn Zope 3. On the one hand, it's really the only option now, with Stephan Richter's book not moving to a second edition, and no other books on the horizon; on the other hand, even without competitors, it's amazingly welcoming, clear and thorough.